Graduate Research in Law

Novanet is the online catalogue of the Dalhousie libraries. The Dalhousie Libraries are members of the Novanet consortium of Academic Libraries. This means you can simultaneously search for materials across the Nova Scotia's academic libraries, and request that material be delivered to your home library for pickup, or when available, for scan and email.

Worldcat is the meta-search tool that searches our Novanet Library Catalogue, other academic libraries' catalogue, as well as many of Dalhousie databases (though not many law sources). Use this tool as a good general search for textbooks anywhere.

E-Books

The Law Library subscribes to several e-book collections:

• Irwin Law's Essentials of Canadian Law series through the V-Lex platform,
• Emond's Legal Textbooks collection on Vital Source platform, and,
• Westlaw's Proview - Electronic Looseleaf collection.

Book reviews are important tools for evaluating books. Canadian law book reviews are listed in the Index to Canadian Legal Literature (ICLL). ICLL is divided into abstracts by subject, author, case and legislation comments, and book reviews.

Theses are a valuable resource not only for their content but also for their thorough literature reviews. Unlike a treatise or textbook which may assume a background knowledge of the subject, the author of a theses must demonstrate a solid understanding of the literature of the field. This is usually captured in the literature review and bibliography.

• Dalhousie theses can be located in the Novanet catalogue and since 2009 are are archived in DalSpace.
• Canadian theses can be located through the Theses Canada online portal. Many can be downloaded fulltext.
• International and subject collections of theses can be located through the Dalhousie Libraries database collections.